Loosely inspired by The Silence, a short story by Zadie Smith.
It starts with a forced silence. Later it might not be forced, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The silence is not yet inside of you; it has to be sought out, manufactured. Today, you found it hiding in the extra-silent study room of the already-silent public library. Last night, your living room was not quite perfectly silent until you drank exactly three ounces of liquor; no less, no more. Some go into nature to find it, others meditate for hours, and many, many, spend their lives frustrated because they don’t find enough. It’s there, though. That's the frustrating part. It’s always there, it’s just skittish. The world hasn’t been kind to it.
Sometimes you will annoy others, or yourself, in pursuit of the silence. Like when staying at your parent’s house and they leave the news on—an ambient soundtrack of Gaza Epstein Forest Fire Zelenskyy—and you turn it off every time because they’re not really listening, and then they turn it on an hour later, disturbed by the silence, and five minutes later you turn it off again. Or when the silence avails itself somewhere you can’t get to because you’re at a dinner party, and everyone’s words that were so charming seconds before are now grating and artificial.
You eventually reach one of those silent places. For a while, nothing happens. The silence festers around you. You are not so porous to it, but the heightened levels in the air cause a gradual, imperceptible seeping. After six minutes, or forty-five, you notice that your brain has fallen silent. Your body is shocked by this. It registers the silence as an illness. And then it makes you sick. You vomit something out. Poetry or a floral arrangement or a dance move or a compliment to your partner. The puke is sitting there, on the page, in the vase, in the pose you’ve struck, in your partner’s surprised face, and you look at it and think, where did that come from.
Now the reader is thinking, ah, the writer symbolizes artistic inspiration, or the creative impulse, with silence. That’s absolutely what the writer is doing. But that’s not quite right. The silence precedes inspiration or impulse. It has no purpose. It is a formless opening, inside of which you are totally safe. Where the world is exactly what it is. Inspiration and impulse are rarely silent, or purposeless, or safe. You kick off into their turbulence from the safety of silence. You don’t even kick, you are launched. The codes are built into your system like the action potential of a cell. Attempting to wade in from the not-silence leaves you floundering; you lack momentum.
But there is little use in thinking about the above. This is not a step-by-step process. There is only one step. You are called to a silent place and then you submit to it. After each instance of absorbing the silence and spewing something out, a little stays with you. Silence accumulates. You won’t need to extract it as often from external places. You’ll produce it in surroundings that are not silent at all. Others will begin to sense it upon you. Some will not appreciate this—remember, the silence is toxic. It can’t be bought or sold, it contains nothing of the ego; modernity has no use for it.
But other silent-seekers will be drawn to you, the same way you were beckoned to the study room in the public library, where you sat and puked out this letter. They will happen upon you as if by chance and you will give away your silence to them without question. When it makes them ill, you’ll silently encourage them. You’ll realize these people are everywhere, calling silently to each other. Despite every barrier erected, they, and you, will keep converging in an expanding constellation of silence. You’ll resist the temptation to call yourself anything—not artists, intellectuals, monks. You’ll resist the temptation to interpret whatever spews out from your silence, to label it art, to assign it adjectives and categories. You’ll return to the silence to mine it, nurture it, share it, forgetting the need to insult it with explanations. Unlike everything else in this noisy world, it has already said what it needs to say.
Another great article thanks!